Archives for 2010

Random notes from a strange early spring

It has been gorgeous here in DC for the past few days, unseasonably warm with highs in the upper 60s even passing the 70degF mark. Gorgeous weather isn’t necessarily the best for contemplation. It’s too easy to be distracted by suddenly visible flesh and the feel of the sun on your face. Still, a few things have popped out over the past few weeks that bear mentioning.

Fashion

Something is wrong with us culturally. I say this truly not because of the usual reasons why someone declares our culture sick or simply wrong. No, I say this because we have no coherent fashion motif other than shear chaos. Our local PBS station ran this past season two documentaries on our fair city, Washington In The ’60s and Washington In The ’70s and even though culturally and historically the 1960s and the 1970s overlap by quite a bit (really what we think of as “the ’60s” began in November 1963 and ended April 4, 1975), it’s not hard to look at the footage and tell with a fair degree of certainty which time period you’re looking at. The same can not be said for walking down the street in the present day.

During our recent good weather shortly after seeing the 40ish gentleman with the p.o.r.n. ‘stach worthy of something from the Linda Lovelace era I spotted a guy who couldn’t have been more than 23 years-old wearing the following: off-white khakis with a crease so sharp you could cut yourself on them, topsiders, not one but two Polo shirts (in complimentary, pastel colors) with the collars turned up, that hint of stubble meant to look like two days’ growth, and oversized sunglasses in black plastic and a style that would have said “nerd” in 1955. Now, can you name that year in gay fashion? If you guessed 1983 or 1984 you get the grand prize.

If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?

Ah…spring, and with it come the tourists. Normally, we wouldn’t be seeing hordes of confused, scared looking people with maps until early April when the Cherry Blossoms are predicted to be in peak bloom. This is not a normal year.

Yesterday we had not one, not two, but three major events downtown – the national marathon; an anti-health care reform rally (um, yeah, ’cause I like getting denied coverage because “being female” is considered a pre-existing condition), and an anti-war rally – all at the same time. Aptly labeled “the first fringe of spring” by DCist.com, this is more crazy than even we’re used to. Good thing METRO has made sure that they’re cutting back on weekend track work in April so all those wonderful folks from out of town can get around ’cause hey, if you live here you’re used to being trapped at home on the weekends or adding an extra hour to a trip that normally takes 20-30 minutes.

What do you mean “all the lights are on?”

I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR lately and between reports about the health care bill and why it might move forward or might not move forward, there have been several reports about the stalled climate and energy bill. That combined with the way my brain works got me to thinking how tied to a certain way of life many of our idioms are.

“All the lights are on but nobody’s home” describes someone who seems to have life in hand but in reality isn’t either fully engaged or is incapable of being fully engaged because of lack of intellect. This is an expression that depends upon the idea that energy is cheap enough that leaving “all the lights on” in your house is something you would routinely do. And I wondered as I sat in my car on the way to the inspection station if I would live to see a time when there were people wandering my country who couldn’t parse that idiom because energy was so expensive no one would think to leave a light on any longer than necessary.

The apocalypse may very well have arrived

America is about to become the only first world nation without reliable mail service.

And in totally unrelated news, my employer hasn’t paid rent on the office I work in for more than 6 months. Last week we got a “pay up or get out” notice from our landlord. Now, how realistic is the idea that we could come up with $100,000 in back rent in 10 business days when we haven’t paid full rent on time in 6 months? Not very, I think, which is why I went in over the weekend and got pretty much all of my personal items out of the office. Any one want in on the unemployment date pool?

As for a lamb

It is axiomatic that the employer-employee relationship is exploitive. Employers will do everything within their power, occasionally whether those measures are legal or not, to squeeze as much work out of out of employees as possible. Sometimes they do this by constructing benefits packages that create classes of employees usually rewarding those in management with more vacation, holidays, or other valuable but non-monetary compensation than what’s offered to grunts outside the offices and conference rooms. Sometimes they do it by low-balling salary offers knowing full well that getting any sort of decent raise after being hired is nigh on impossible.

I know all this so it shouldn’t surprise me that I continually run up against variations of techniques designed to get the most possible out of me as an employee. What is unusual is that it’s not often that I get the opportunity to witness such policy being born.

Last week BigBoss was in the office for his regular visit and after spending about 30 minutes asking me for details about a long-term project that has been stalled for about 8 months for want of the funds to push it forward he finally asked if there was anything else I wanted to discuss. Since it’s been about two weeks since snowmaggedon and the great “let’s send canvassers out into a blizzard while we make people who can’t work from home take 4 days of vacation” debacle, I asked “Have you given any more thought to the inclement weather policy changes we discussed?”

Turns out that BigBoss had given the matter some thought and he wanted my “frank opinion” about his decision to make SeniorCampaignsWoman in charge of making the inclement weather decisions. We both agreed that it would be better than having him or having our ManagingDirector, the one who lives in Miami, in charge because SeniorCampaignsWoman would at least be able to adequately able to judge local weather conditions. Unfortunately, I said, it still left staff in the same position of not knowing whether or not the office was open or closed because SeniorCampaignsWoman isn’t the best at communicating.

BigBoss replied that ManagingDirector had this fixed idea about never closing the office because it meant closing down the canvass which meant no money coming in the door. His thinking is that the exempt employees who can work at home should and non-exempt employees who can’t work at home would just get paid days off in the case of weather emergencies.

Let me turn that around, I said, and ask the question from the other side: how is it fair that those folks get paid days off and the rest of us wouldn’t?

Well, he says, exempt employees like me, ChickCoworker, and DataBaseAdmin get paid more, have more responsibility and flexibility in our schedules than non-exempt employees, and are expected to do more than our lower paid, non-exempt colleagues.

True, I said, but most non-profits recognize that they pay under market and offer better benefits to compensate for that to keep quality employees, and, quite frankly, we pay under market even for non-profit and our benefits are shit.

And after we went around with this for a while, I pointed out to him that one of the things that bothered me about the whole situation was that SeniorCampaignsWoman had told her direct supervisee, basically, I recognize in the emergency you might have other responsibilities, use your best judgement and get the vital things done, and that the message I got was “you’re expected to do 8 hours” without any recognition that in a massive weather emergency I might have other responsibilities. Essentially, I told him, if you’re going to treat me like a thief you’ve given me no reason not to steal from you.

That is a valid point, and, he admitted, ManagingDirector didn’t really have a good grasp of what was actually going on during snowmaggedon, but he still believes that those of us who get paid more and have more flexibility in our schedules should be expected to do more than others.

Now at this point, I withdrew from the conversation with a fair amount of artistry I think but let’s unpack this for a second.

Essentially what he told me was: Your skills are worth more on the open market so we made your position exempt and higher paid but because we made your position exempt and higher paid we’re going to ask you to do more than we’re really paying you for in salary without compensating you for that in any other way. In fact, we’re going to compensate your lower paid coworkers with the one most valuable thing that no one can ever get more of while you work using your own equipment and your own access that we’re not in any way defraying the cost of or compensating you for the usage of.

And remember, this is the same organization that doesn’t give raises based on merit performance but instead gives everyone in the same “pay band” a baseline increase thereby providing no incentive for anyone to work harder than doing just enough to not get fired (after all, if I bust my ass I get the same raise as my coworker who just barely shows up).

What amazes me even more than his audacity to say to my face that he recognized that they didn’t pay me what I was worth but that he was still going to require me to do more than I am being compensated for is that he doesn’t see the moral and ethical loophole he created.

See, if I am expected to use my judgement and manage my workplan as I see fit, and if I have more flexibility in my schedule, it sounds to me like my judgement is saying that some days, based on what I have going, that maybe, just maybe there isn’t going to be a great need to work particularly hard.

^* The proverb goes: As good be hang’d for an old sheep as a young lamb.

Smile and maybe they won’t notice the apocalypse

frowny — Why yes that is Comic Sans MS! How good of you to notice.

I am not by nature a positive person. Chemical imbalance in the brain, what they tell us is the cause of both major and recurrent depression, is to blame for that; personally, I blame puberty but that’s a whole separate discussion. That fact that I am also judged to be “not a positive person” has more to do with unrealistic expectations on the part of society, and particularly the “look at me” society of illusion we seem to be encouraging these days, than with how I actually behave.

When presented with an idea I tend to think ahead, to try to anticipate roadblocks to achieving whatever the stated goal might be. Some of this is directly due to my upbringing – my mother never liked to be caught unprepared for a contingency and raised me to have the same attitude – and some of it is because I am rather goal oriented and I dislike failing to achieve a goal for a preventable reason. In this age of positive psychology and awards for participation, asking questions up front about whether or not we have the resources to achieve a goal, or if we manifestly don’t how we plan on getting them, or whether or not we’re willing to scale back what we want to match the resources we do have is seen as negative, as being “a drag.”

When you combine that brain-depression with all the things that go with it, like insomnia, which exacerbates circular, catastrophic thinking which exacerbates the depression, rinse and repeat, with a training and bent that wants to anticipate obstacles every now and then what you get is a really bad mood. But in an optimism fueled, can-do, think positive, nothing is actually a failure and all you have to do is apologize or play the victim and you can be redeemed world, bad moods are unacceptable. And no where is this more evident than in the world of social networks.

Social networks, for those who have managed to live under a rock for the past three years and have avoided all the media spunk over how this new way of relating is going to change the world and kill privacy, connect you to a vast array of people either by: 1) scraping your address book and sending messages, with or without your permission, to the folks therein, 2) by allowing you to form voluntary connections suggested by previous life events like the school you attended or the presence of a fan page or group that you’ve joined, 3) by looking at your online behavior, like sending e-mail, and just automatically connecting you to the people you already communicate with frequently, or 3) by allowing you to search topics and interests and follow the posts of people you are intrigued by whether they follow your posts or not. These are the connections models for these networks are in order: 1) Quechup (among other spam social networks); 2) Facebook; 3) Google Buzz; and 4) Twitter.

You are directly rewarded for your participation in these networks with recognition from your “friends” who either give you some sort of “like” or a comment on your current status – Michelle is having a relaxing Sunday afternoon; Kim is going jogging for the first time since the baby was born – or most recent posting. Lack of response to something you’ve posted on a social network is the equivalent of sitting down at table in the high school cafeteria and having everyone else get up and move. It is shunning: we don’t like what you have to say so we’re going to ignore you.

And while that may be human nature, after all the axiom that there is no such thing as bad publicity (just ask Tiger Woods) exists for a reason, to ignore the things that we just want to go away, what does it say when we have our media effectively encouraging us to shun our depressed, fat, or lonely friends because these emotions are contagious and might cause us to feel the same thing?

What does this do but force those of us who aren’t always cheerful, who aren’t “having a relaxing Sunday,” to pretend that we are thereby denying genuine human emotion?

I understand that someone who is constantly negative can be a drag, but maybe we need to pay more attention to frequency and a little bit less attention to content. Maybe, just maybe, we need to relearn that the purpose of grouping together into this wonderful thing we call “society” is to create an environment in which all of us don’t have to be strong at the same time. Or maybe we need to grow the fuck up and realize that life isn’t always pretty and happy and that by expecting it, and everyone in it, to be thus we set an unreasonable bar for happiness that turns us into pleasure junkies who have to constantly search for bigger, greater, more joyful experiences just to get any pleasure out of life at all.

Snow? Blizzard? Just work at home.

I work for the stingiest non-profit organization on the planet. I know that sounds like hyperbole but given that during DC’s recent snowstorm, while just about everyone, except essential personnel like emergency workers and plow drivers, was home enjoying four days off I was home working 8 hours a day. And why is this?

Because unlike every other non-profit the city, we do not follow the Federal government for our inclement weather policy. No, our inclement weather policy is, effectively, we have no policy. Actually, that’s not true. Our inclement weather policy is that a 20-something man with no responsibilities outside work gets to determine if our office is open or our office is closed.

See, the non-profit I work for operates out of several of our offices, including the one in DC, what’s called a field canvass. Ostensibly we send people out door to door to educate and garner support for the issues we work on but the reality is it’s a fundraising/sales job. Full-time canvassers receive a base hourly rate, it’s true, but they also receive a bonus based on how much money they raise in a set time period (a night, a week, etc). Not only do the individual canvassers receive a bonus based on how much money they bring in, the Canvass Director also receives a bonus if they exceed their fundraising goals. If the canvass doesn’t go out, the Canvass Director only makes his base salary.

According to our Managing Director, who I should mention is based in Miami, FL, if the field canvass is open, the office is open which means office staff are expected to work. So, we’ve given responsibility for determining whether or not our office is open or closed to someone who benefits financially from us never closing. There is an inherent conflict of interest here. And I’m not the only one who sees it.

After exchanging several e-mails via our local staff list with said Canvass Director about how it was completely insane to send canvassers out last Wednesday while DC was under a blizzard warning, a blizzard warning that was so bad that local government was telling people to say inside because the weather was “life threatening,” BigBoss, who is also on the local staff list, recommended that we continue our discussion with just each other and that if either of us had concerns we could contact him directly. So, I did.

BigBoss,

To be honest with you, I’m completely and utterly livid over the fact that our inclement weather policy is, effectively, “we never close.” When I asked ManagingDirector about this on Monday, and why we don’t follow the Fed, the sane, reliable thing that most other non-profits do, her response was: “I know the weather is bad and I lived in DC for 20 years and did have a few snow days. But you know the government should not be the benchmark â€“ they close for 1 inch of snow.” Quite frankly, this is a knee jerk, inaccurate reaction.

First, In the 8 years GW Bush was President the Fed closed maybe half a dozen times for weather related reasons and had maybe half again as many “liberal leave” days. In eight years.

Second, no, you aren’t here. Neither is ManagingDirector. This city is paralyzed. Our public transportation isn’t running, and won’t be running right probably until the end of next week, if then. Most of the streets downtown haven’t been adequately plowed enough for Metro to deem them safe to run buses on, and most neighborhood streets, at least in wards (like mine) that aren’t predominently white, which means most of the city, haven’t seen a plow at all. We haven’t had mail delivery since last Friday and as of last night there were still from last Saturday nearly 6,000 people without electricity.

It does not make any sense to have someone who is not here who can not accurately assess the conditions making the decision about whether or not we should be open.

Third, to have a policy which is, effectively, that a 20-something with very few responsibilities outside work gets to decide whether or not the office is open – according to ManagingDirector if the Canvass is working, the office is open – leaves staff members subject to unecessary anxiety.

We have no idea whether or not we should be working, are expected to be working, are going to be penalized if we don’t work, or what. There is no reliable yardstick, like following the Fed, that we can use. And since our internal communication is so poor, people are left to do nothing but wonder.

There is also the issue of the position this puts employees, like DudeCoworker, who simply can not work from home. I, and others like ChickCoworker and DataBaseAdmin, have been working this whole week while the DC office has, ostensibly, been open; DudeCoworker has been home with no way to get into the office, assuming of course it was safe for him to do so. So he’s supposed to burn a week’s vacation, or more, because we have no snow closing policy while I can elect not to? Somehow that just doesn’t seem fair.

Lastly, while I recognize and appreciate that working from home is a benefit, it feels more than slightly exploitive to be required to work from home. I can’t describe it more accurately than to say that it feels very Victorian in nature (if you can work, you must!).

The canvass already has a separate pay schedule from office staff, and a separate leave, work, and holiday schedule so it doesn’t seem reasonable to tie our open or closed policy to whether or not they are working. If MouthBreather, et al. deem it safe for the FCV to be out, and I heartily disagree, obviously, that it is, then that is their call, but when all our other processes are separate, why tie these two together?

I strongly recommend that you put in place a policy that for inclement weather the DC office follows the Federal government for closings and “liberal leave” status. It makes bad weather a “set it and forget it” situtation.

Thank you for your time.

It took him exactly 15 minutes to send me back a one line response.

You are right and I’m concerned about the lack of on-site decision making by a senior staff person. I am going to fix this. Stay tuned.
BigBoss

The thing of it is: I’d mind this mismanagement less if they’d just admit they are the cheapest people on the planet – most non-profits recognize that they pay below market rate and compensate for it by providing better benefits (more time off, better insurance, a full slate of public holidays and then some); mine does none of these things – and that they will never, ever give time off they think they can get away with not giving and, most off all, will never turn down an opportunity to get cash in the door.

We’re expecting more snow starting Monday afternoon. Admittedly, the predicted 2-6 inches of accumulation is nothing compared to the 40 inches we’ve gotten since February 3rd but I have to wonder: how long should I wait before I poke him about instituting an actual policy?

And, of course, I’m resisting the urge to ask if the Miami office will be open during the next hurricane warning.

Things I should have said

I’ve got a neighbor who refuses to shovel her walk. Not for 4 inches of snow, not for the 26 inches we just got over the weekend. When I asked her about it this afternoon while she was busily digging out her car and throwing the snow from that onto the sidewalk she hadn’t bothered to shovel her response was “I did the best I could on the front.” And my reply was “It’s your property and you’re required to shovel the walk.”

Her response: “I’m tired.”

And what I should have said instead of “Yeah, and I shoveled for 7.5 hours on Saturday and managed to get my walk and my mother’s walk right across the street cleared so I know about being tired.” was

“I don’t care.”
or
“Really? And were you tired when you didn’t shovel the four inches of snow we got last Wednesday?”
or
“Then perhaps you should park your vehicle in front of your house instead of on our short, no-outlet street with limited parking.”
or
“Well, if you can’t maintain your property, maybe you should move.”
or
“Gee, you know, my mother told me people like you existed but I never thought I’d actually meet a permanent, full-time asshole. Thank you for a unique life experience.”

If it didn’t take so much energy I would, tomorrow while she is at work, shovel the entire walk into the parking space she so lovingly cleared. It’s going to be especially fun with the 10-20 inches of additional snow we’re predicted to get overnight Tuesday.

Of course, the other thing I’m left to deal with besides my OCD and my impotent rage is an absolute rapture at the stupidity of pissing off someone who knows where you live. Not that she doesn’t know where I live but were I a more vengeful a person I would dare her to prove that I’m the one who injected soda into your driver’s side door lock during the night so it could freeze solid for several hours before a work day.

Update: Petty Revenge

Our trash collection happens in the alleys in my neighborhood which means that it won’t be happening probably for the rest of the month.Â I have two ways to get to my can: I can go out the back and open my gate or I can go out the front and walk down the alley with my trash to my garage where my trash and recycling cans are sitting.Â With 2+ feet of drifted snow against my gate, going out the back wasn’t an option.

And as I was trying to figure out how I was going to drag a trash bag and a bag of recyclables down an alley piled with with snow and rutted with ice crusted tire tracks I noticed that my neighbor on the corner had very carefully cleared the snow off the top of her city-issued can.

Well, you know, I was tired from shoveling all that snow so I just put my trash in the most convenient can.Â I just can’t help it if that means that her trash can is now full and she won’t have any place to put her refuse.Â ’cause, you know, I was tired.Â Petty, yes?Â But you know, the problem with karma is that you hardly ever get to watch in in action.Â And yeah, maybe I’ve done my own karma some damage by doing something mean, but I think it all balances out.